We’re Choking on Smoke in Seattle

By Lindy West

Aug. 9, 2017

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The haze of smoke from wildfires in British Columbia hangs over Lake Union in Seattle on Tuesday evening.CreditCreditRuth Fremson/The New York Times

SEATTLE — The weather forecast for Seattle on Wednesday reads “89 degrees, smoke.” We first noticed the smoke, drifting down from wildfires still burning in British Columbia, around Aug. 2, just as a heat wave sent temperatures spiking well into the 90s (the historical average for that week is 77) and the ubiquitous Pacific winds dwindled to a standstill. “Nature’s air-conditioning is broken,” the National Weather Service told the Seattle Times.

The sky turned brown and opaque. The neighboring city of Bellevue, which normally glitters above Lake Washington to the east, disappeared. The mountains disappeared. I haven’t seen a tree move in a week. It’s as though a giant cloche has been placed over the whole region, like God is playing molecular gastronomy and we are her smoked langoustine cotton candy duck balloons. You can feel the air on your skin, powdery and wrong, somehow both sweltering and clammy. Residents have been warned not to exercise; people with asthma are clutching their inhalers, white-knuckled.

There’s a mental health impact, too. To live in Seattle is to exist, perpetually, in the bargaining stage of grief. From October through May, generally speaking, it drizzles. Every day. This past fall and winter, we broke a 122-year-old record for rain and had only three sunny, mild days in six months. What gets us through the gray, like a mantra, is the promise of summer. Summers in Seattle are perfect, bright blue and fresh, and all winter long we assure ourselves, over and over, “This is worth it, for that.” Please let this one be a good summer, a long summer, a real Seattle summer. We need it. It’s our medicine.

This smoke is stealing our summer. People are on edge. Traffic seems worse. Yesterday, in the car, my husband was telling me about two guys he saw fighting on the street, when I got distracted by two guys fighting on the street. It’s been a freaky, tense time.

It was evocative, to put it mildly, to read in The Times about a forthcoming federal climate change report while choking on hot, brown smoke.

Not only are human behaviors “primarily responsible” for climate change, the report says, but the repercussions are not some vague abstraction for distant equatorial communities or our faceless descendants to deal with. Americans are feeling the impacts of climate change right this second.

“In the United States,” Lisa Friedman wrote, “the report concludes with ‘very high’ confidence that the number and severity of cool nights have decreased since the 1960s, while the frequency and severity of warm days have increased.” The report also notes that cold waves are less common and heat waves are more common.

Scientists are nervously awaiting the Trump administration’s reaction to the report, citing fears that it might be changed or even suppressed altogether in order to appease President Trump’s denialist base and dystopian corporate bedfellows.

I don’t mean to imply that these wildfires and this smoke are the direct result of human-made climate change. I have no idea. I am not a scientist. What I mean is that they have thrown formerly intangible feelings of dread into stark perspective. All week I have stared at the low, dirty sky and thought, “What if this never left? What if it got worse?”

Irrespective of their cause, the fires’ impact — the claustrophobia, the tension, the suffocating, ugly air — feels like a preview (and a mild one) of what’s to come if we don’t take immediate and drastic steps to halt and mitigate climate change. Temperatures will almost certainly rise. Air quality will almost certainly decline. I do not want to live like this, and you don’t either.

It’s easy, if you are not in immediate danger of being swallowed by the sea or strangled by drought, to slip into normalcy. Moment to moment, for a lot of people in America, everything still feels fine, unchanged. Even if you genuinely believe that doom is coming, it is possible to set aside your panic for a while and, say, go get a coffee. Wash your dog. Bicker with your spouse. The stoplights still work and you can still buy avocados at the supermarket and life is still as mundane and tedious as it’s always been. Boredom is somehow even more reassuring than happiness.

But we’re well past the window of procrastination. This is the time.

Seattle this week looks like one of those old photos of America’s smog-socked skylines from before the Clean Air Act and the Environmental Protection Agency, an echo as oddly hopeful as it is horrifying. The thing about human-made climate change is that it’s human-made, which means that humans, to some degree, can unmake it. It will take more than good liberals composting their pizza boxes. We need to make profound changes to the way that industry, commerce and corporations function in this country, which means that we need government intervention, which means, unfortunately, that we need a different government. Let your representatives know that, and remember it in 2018.

In Seattle, in a week or so, a big wind will come and give us our blue sky back. Someday, though, it won’t.